The meticulous routines that made Tony Pulis’s Stoke City a nightmare to play against are back in fashion but still disparaged as Arsenal embrace set-piece revolution
12:04, 28 Oct 2025
Arsene Wenger used to decry Stoke City as anti-football but Arsenal have embraced set pieces and long throws under MIkel Arteta.
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Arsene Wenger used to decry Stoke City as anti-football but Arsenal have embraced set pieces and long throws under MIkel Arteta.
It has taken a while but even football snobs are now realising the potential of set-pieces and long throws.
The power of the dead ball has been a huge part of football since the sport started to be codified in the 19th century but there have been some Arsene Wenger-shaped egotists who have turned up their noses at the supposed simplicity of it.
Wenger became the ringleader, accusing opponents such as Stoke City of being ‘anti-football’ as he made what felt like a miserable annual pilgrimage to be beaten in the Potteries.
But his successor, Mikel Arteta, has taken the baton from Tony Pulis to lead the charge against Wenger and his acolytes and embrace the ways to score goals and win games that don’t involve 54 short passes.
This season, 69 per cent – 11 out of 16 – of Arsenal’s goals have come from set pieces and they sit top of the Premier League. Across the division, 19 per cent of goals have come from corners.
There is a theory that attackers are taking advantage of new freedoms in the penalty area since the introduction of VAR as defenders fear being pulled up on camera for using their arms to block runners.
But Chris Sutton thinks there are managers and pundits who are finally getting over a degree of snootiness too.
He said on 5Live’s Monday Night Club: “If Tony Pulis was Spanish… Tony Pulis was regarded as a bit of a dinosaur in some quarters but Mikel Arteta does it and he’s a genius. Tony Pulis was doing it years before Arteta. How is a long throw different from when Tony Pulis does it?”
Fellow guest Rory Smith didn’t seem to agree, suggesting that Arteta era set-pieces are more scientific than the apparent blood and thunder approach that Pulis oversaw back at Stoke.
He said: “The main difference now is that the players taking the long throw cost £70m. The throw itself is maybe no different at all. I think long throws are basically being used for the chaos element because it’s really difficult to defend them.
“But from corners and free-kicks it looks like there are set and quite heavily layered blocking patterns that didn’t exist in the 1990s. Maybe I’m wrong.
“I don’t want to offend Chris but, as a fan, I would say that set-pieces now look much more complicated than they were when Chris was playing and I was watching football as a small child.”
Well, maybe he is wrong.
The science behind Tony Pulis’s Stoke set-pieces
Premier League clubs, by and large, shifted away from traditional Friday training set-piece drills about a decade ago to instead use that time to focus on how to press, suggested former England, Spurs and Crystal Palace winger Andros Townsend.
Nowadays set-piece coaches have become in vogue and Sean Dyche, now at Nottingham Forest, argued it was a matter of styles of play, like styles of jeans, coming in and out of fashion.
Pulis spent long hours on the Clayton Wood training ground going through routines with his squad, defensively and offensively – to the point of having hidden signs between players for what was about to happen next.
Danny Higginbotham recently told The Athletic: “It was about the hand going up and our timing in the box being based around that movement. Often we’d begin a routine even before the arm went up, but all based on the precise moment the taker stepped back before he moved forward to strike the ball. It was about timing.
“Sometimes it’d be the taker putting his hand on the corner flag for a moment before he takes it. For us, that often meant it was a ball being played to the near post for someone to flick it on, so you’d see someone scurrying to get in position.
“We had a routine where a certain hand movement meant something that I scored a good few goals from. I’d be at the near post facing the corner taker and as he took his first step backwards, I’d spin, run beyond the far post, then turn and sprint back towards goal. You get it down to an art form after a while.
“I’d be confident it’d lead to a chance of scoring. But you’d be doing it 15 times in training and if the timing was wrong, you’d keep going, again and again. You’re always focused on the corner taker, ready to watch what he does and respond.”
Moving and blocking at corner kicks
Blocking runners isn’t a new thing either.
There was one particular routine when Jon Walters scored at West Ham in November 2012 that was drooled over forensically by Gary Neville, who was making his first steps as a Sky Sports analyst.
It was actually dusted off for Stoke to use again when Rory Delap was in charge of set-pieces in July 2020, using Sam Clucas and Tyrese Campbell. Pulis used it successfully when he was briefly in charge of Sheffield Wednesday later that year as well.
“I loved it, I absolutely loved it and I’ll go into the detail of it here,” said Neville back during the half-time break at Upton Park. “It’s the timing I’m most interested in, looking at Glenn Whelan and when did Jon Walters start his run? Whelan puts a little touch on the ball and if you move the film forward frame by frame it’s at that point that Walters starts to move. The signal has happened.
“Then the next man kicks in: Peter Crouch. On cue. And he gives a little glimpse to Walters to make sure he’s done his job. ‘Yes, he’s gone.’ Then the next man kicks in: Charlie Adam, blocking George McCartney. Some might not like it. A foul? I loved it, absolutely loved it. Then the next man kicks in. As Whelan is just about to kick it, Robert Huth engages (Joey) O’Brien.
“And all this time, Jon Walters is making his run around the back.
“Then two things have to happen: the pass has to be accurate and quick over a long distance, which is difficult; and the finish has to be perfect. Believe me, that is a difficult technique.
“That is clockwork and meticulous preparation. It’s an ethic of standing on a standing on a windswept 6C Stoke pitch on a Friday morning for an hour probably going through it while 15 of the squad are either being shadow defenders or watching from the sidelines.
“For every little bit of that to work, you need four or five people to do everything perfectly at exactly the right time. The key of that goal is the timing. It’s meticulous work and the reward that Tony Pulis, his coaches and his players deserve for discipline in doing that.
“There’s a massive amount of skill in putting that together and if any coach of a football team wants to try that set piece and try to get five or six players to time it the way happened when Whelan just steps back…
“Not many people will have that on their goal of the season list but for me who has been on both sides as a player and now a coach, I appreciate that goal massively. If anyone has a football team, try to recreate that. It is tough.”
Idea that ‘the throw is no different’ needs challenging
Stoke’s major weapon when they won promotion to the Premier League in 2008 wasn’t just strength at set-pieces but, of course, Delap’s long throw. Nine out of 38 goals in their debut season came from Delap hurling it in from the touchline.
Pulis said: “We needed to do things that would help us stay up. It wasn’t about me; it was all about the football club. For us to build a football club we had to stay in the Premier League.”
Anyone who can chuck it long might have been compared to Delap in the subsequent 17 years but his throws weren’t just about length but power and trajectory.
“We made sure that Rory was throwing it in a certain area and we made sure we had certain runners across it and around it,” said Pulis. “We always had someone who would be able to attack across the goalkeeper. We did certain things specifically to get the majority of first touches on it.”
Not everyone was impressed.
“You cannot say it is football anymore,” moaned Wenger.
Arteta seems to have rolled his eyes at that kind of nonsense as much as everyone else.
When Arsenal were dubbed “the new Stoke City” by Dimitar Berbatov after scoring from two corners against Manchester United last winter, their manager did not see it as an insult.
He said: “I understood very well what Berbatov said, and it was said in the best possible way. We take it as a big compliment, and as a fuel to be better.
“We want to be the kings of everything. Set-pieces, the best in the world. High press, the best in the world. In open spaces, the best in the world. The best atmosphere in the stadium and the best at everything.
“Before it was said that we didn’t score enough, that we were soft at defending, we didn’t have the mentality, we were not physical enough, we didn’t beat big teams away from home for 17 years, 20 years, 22 years.
“We want to be the best at everything we do. We want to have the best academy, be the best at player development, recruit the best players, best coaches. That’s the aim.”
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